With about 1 billion health searches happening on Google every day, it's not hard to understand why censoring natural health information serves a multitude of interests, not the least of which is Big Pharma's bottom line.

A new analysis released by Bob Troia, Twitter handle Quantified Bob, reveals how health sites have been decimated by Google in the period tracked from April 15th, 2018 to August 15th, 2019.

He posted the following graphic on Twitter on August 25th, 2019, showing as high as a 99.87% decrease in visibility through Google search results, and a 81.14% drop for Greenmedinfo.com.

However, you don't have to fall into the stereotypes of a health freedom advocate, vaccine choice, or natural health obsessed organization to feel the pain of Google's purge. Examine.com, for instance, which prides itself on being entirely science-based, and who has written about how "you do not need to worry about MSG," "Curcumin is not a panacea," and "Diet soda is unlikely to hurt your health," also got hit hard. The founder recently wrote an article to answer the question: "Why has Examine.com disappeared from search results?" He and his organization played by Google's rules, yet have all but disappeared from the search results. The same happened to Joe Cohen, founder of Self-Hacked, who wrote an excellent article on the subject here: "Google Is Taking Censorship of Health Websites to The Next Level."

There is evidence, however, that the censorship may also target sites that speak out about drug side effects, such as People's Pharmacy, who published a report on August 19th titled, "Is Google Censoring Drug Side Effect Information?" The site's founder, Joe Graedon, writes:

"Many health websites have been buried by a new Google algorithm update. Search is fruitless. We provide drug side effect information. Why can't you find it?"

Censorship, of course, is not new. Book burning, for instance, has been around for at least as long as books have existed. What's happening today is that Big Tech platforms, which receive immunity from lawsuits against suppressing free speech due to a loophole within the Communications Decency Act (Section 230), are nonetheless acting like publishers by choosing who can and cannot express an opinion or exercise their First Amendment rights. We experienced this first hand with Pinterest December 2018 decision to ban us for posting natural health and vaccine skeptical information, and then Mailchimp's decision to kick us off their platform for "anti-vaccine content" (a stipulation, incidentally, which was not in their terms of use agreement) in June of this year, after nearly a decade of perfect compliance, finding out soon after that they are a CDC Foundation partner, a red flag for conflicts of interest and politically biased motivations operative between Mailchimp and this non-profit (more aptly, "pay to play") outgrowth of the CDC.

To be perfectly honest, I am not at all surprised by what's happening. I created GreenMedInfo.com a decade ago within an already well-established context of widespread censorship and mischaracterization of the evidence supporting natural medicine. The very inspiration for it was to fill the void out there of science-based information supporting what millions around the world already know: the body can heal itself with the right conditions, without drugs. Given that Google fields more than a billion health-related questions every day, or the equivalent of 70,000 each minute, there's a massive amount of money and power on the line here.1Funneling this gold mine of traffic to WebMd versus natural health websites greatly affects the sociopolitical and economic wellbeing of billions around the world.Given the recent collaborations between Big Pharma and Big Tech, including a $715 million deal between Google's parent company Alphabet and GlaxoSmithKline in 2016, this purge of the internet of alternative voices was to be expected. Only, I did not expect Google to be so blatant and audacious about it. Did they really think they'd get away with it? Perhaps they didn't realize how large a contingency is represented by our space. I can count, among those health freedom and natural health organizations I am affiliated with, a reach of at least 100 million strong through social media, and another 100 million through email subscribers to our numerous lists -- and this is a very conservative estimate.

So what can we do? Thankfully, GreenMedInfo.com is not dependent on Google search traffic for our health and well-being. We've never paid for traffic, and we decided to opt-out of monetizing the organic traffic we did and still do have by not displaying Google ads, or similar ad networks. Because we hold true to our mission to reduce and eliminate as much as possible any conflict of interests, we are 100% user supported and supportable. Our membership provides three levels of access, from as little as $8.00 a month for a Friend membership. We also greatly appreciate one time donations.

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Comment: It's not really surprising that Google has made this change in their search algorithm, all but leaving alternative health websites out of their search results. Clearly they've given up on their original motto "Don't Be Evil".

"Given therecent collaborations between Big Pharma and Big Tech, including a$715 million dealbetween Google's parent company Alphabet and GlaxoSmithKline in 2016, this purge of the internet of alternative voices was to be expected."

Try alternatives such as searx. Use preferences top right and deselect google and add in a few other engines such as startpage & yandex. [Link]

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.